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the compaq laptop found what seemed to be correct windows 7 video drivers, but any media playback locked the system up. it even crashed during the media decoding performance test that is part of the windows experience rating. the crash was caused by drivers for the 915gm chipset that aren't fully compatible with wddm 1.0, the new architecture for graphics drivers introduced with vista. this means that the chipset won't completely support the aero visual enhancements or proper hardware video decodingnot yet, anyway. to get the 915gm chipset to play media, hardware acceleration must be turned off, which limits video support. for those with older pcs using this or the 945 chipset, including many laptops and the mac mini, wddm-accelerated drivers from intel are a must.

turing off 3d acceleration allows lackluster media playback with older non-wddm capable drivers. to turn off acceleration within windows 7, go to control panel, then display, and click change display settings from the menu at left. select advanced settings, click the troubleshoot tab, press the "change settings" button (if your display driver allows it), and then move the slider left to "disable all directdraw and direct3d accelerations."

even though this chipset supports directx 9 in windows 2000 and xp, the drivers for windows 7 under the public beta simply aren't fully functioning, and aero will never work. if your 915gm-based laptop has a sticker that says "vista capable," you can thank microsoft: the boys in redmond let intel hit its numbers by allowing this dog to slip through compatibility testing, even though it's not fully functional.

once i turned off hardware acceleration, the compaq notebook was able to decode and play back all sd media formats, including divx and xvid videos, albeit with a blocky texture and loss of frames in full-screen mode. oddly, videos with ac3 audio were unable to play, as that resulted in digital noise, but i remedied the problem by downloading the 1.51a build of ac3filter. the other computers did not experience this issue, so it must be a limitation of the built-in audio hardware and its driver support.

i have a large collection of content from 15 years of encoding multimedia on computers. windows 7 did a nice job of playing back the modern compression formats such as some types of h.264, m4a, and the very popular divx and xvid formats. you cannot directly play iso or vob filescontent containers on dvdsbut vobs can be assembled into one large file and renamed as an mpg for playback. this renaming prevents fast-forwarding or rewinding within the interface, but using a utility such as the creatively named vob2mpg to convert them to mpg enables this. as there are hundreds of codecs and containers, i wasn't able to test them all. but a few common types are found below.